boot from usb hd

[Torfinn Ingolfsen]

On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 17:07:03 +0100
David Bauer <davidbauer at arcor.de> wrote:

> how can I boot FreeBSD from an external USB drive if the BIOS does not
> support this ?

Short answer; you can't.

> Is it possible to boot some kind of mini kernel from floppy, which
> makes the USB drive visible and than boot the FreeBSD kernel from the
> USB drive ? I experimented a bit but so far without success.

This might be doable. You will need a modified bootloader that has
support for USB drives (usb + umass?).
I don't know if anyone have done this, particularly since the bootloader
don't have room for a lot of (extra) drivers.
I think you have a lot of work ahead of you.
If your machine have a CD-ROM drive that you can boot from, you could
try with a FreeBSD live-cd (for example FreeSBIE).

Another way that might work would be to netboot the machine, and use the
netbooted kernel to mount the partitions from you usb drive. This
requires a machine to hold the netboot configuration, and a network.

Hope this helps.
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway